Thursday night!

* 40 obsolete technologies.

* 15 clever logos.

* They're virtually mapping Mt. Rushmore in case it ever gets destroyed.

* Photographs of extinct animals.

Slate has a five-part series on the history of animal experimentation and the animal rights movement. Via MeFi.

Obama science adviser John Holdren says that geo-engineering isn't on the table after all.

Rather than focusing on what Holdren doesn’t believe, let’s focus on what he does. I asked him a simple question. Does he stand by what he published 3 years ago, which I often quote:

“The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.“

He wrote back, “I said exactly that to Seth Borenstein.” In his earlier email, Holdren wrote bluntly:

I said that the approaches that have been surfaced so far seem problematic in terms of both efficacy and side effects, but we have to look at the possibilities and understand them because if we get desperate enough it will be considered. I also made clear that this was my personal view, not Administration policy. Asked whether I had mentioned geo-engineering in any White House discussions, though, I said that I had. This is NOT the same thing as saying the White House is giving serious consideration to geo-engineering – which it isn’t — and I am disappointed that the headline and the text of the article suggest otherwise.

Also at Climate Progress: 'How climate change is causing a new age of extinction.'

Cynical-C has a long post about unusual military use of animals. Some of these are actually pretty disturbing.

The most creative way to use a cat as a weapon happened in World War II. The United States’ OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA) needed a way to guide bombs to sink German ships. Somebody hit upon the inspiration that since cats have such a strong disdain of getting wet and always land on their feet that if you attached a cat to a bomb and drop it in the vicinity of a ship, the cat’s instinct to avoid the water would force it to guide the bomb to the enemy’s deck. It is unclear how the cat was supposed to actually guide a bomb attached to it as it fell from the sky but the plan never got past the testing stages since the cats had a bad habit of becoming unconscious mid-drop.